2 Kings25chapter 25

The siege ran about eighteen months, from the tenth month of Zedekiah's ninth year to the fourth month of his eleventh. Whether that is 588–586 or 587–586 depends on which new-year reckoning is applied to the regnal years; the difference is one year of counting, not a dispute about the event. By the end the famine was total and there was no bread for the people of the land.

The breach comes at night, and the escape route is described street by street: out by the gate between the two walls by the king's garden, then down toward the Arabah, the Jordan rift. The Babylonians catch him on the plains of Jericho when his army scatters.

Riblah, far north in the land of Hamath, was Nebuchadnezzar's field headquarters — the same base Pharaoh Neco had used. What happens there is standard Babylonian treatment of a rebel vassal who broke a sworn treaty: the sons are killed in front of the father, and then his eyes are put out, so that the last thing he sees is the end of his line.

A month later the commander of the guard burns the temple, the palace, and every great house, and the walls are pulled down. The bronze from the pillars, the stands, and the great Sea is broken up for transport, because bronze on that scale was national wealth. Sixty men and the senior priests are executed at Riblah, and the rest go to Babylon. Gedaliah is left as governor at Mizpah and murdered within months by a man of the royal family, and the last of the people flee to Egypt in fear of reprisal. From these final years we have the Lachish ostraca — letters written on pottery from an outpost officer reporting that he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish because the signals of Azekah can no longer be seen.

Then the book ends somewhere unexpected. In 561 BC Evil-merodach, the new king of Babylon, releases Jehoiachin from prison after thirty-seven years, changes his clothes, gives him a seat above the other kings at the royal table, and a daily allowance for life.